The Russian state-owned railway firm RZD stated Wednesday that its web site and cell app had been down for a number of hours as a result of a “large” cyberattack, forcing passengers to solely purchase tickets at railway stations.
The Ukrainian hacktivist group IT Military claimed duty for the assault on its Telegram channel. “The terrorist state is heading continuous to the station referred to as Chaos,” the hackers stated. The group’s claims couldn’t be instantly verified.
RZD’s system was down for at the very least six hours, however the firm stated in a while Wednesday that it had restored its operation regardless of ongoing assaults. A few of the firm’s on-line providers are nonetheless unavailable as a result of elevated load, RZD stated.
“Our aim is to not completely take down the web site. It requires vital effort to arrange an assault on such a goal,” stated IT Military. “Even when the web site is down just for an hour, it will nonetheless have a big impression on the economic system of the aggressor nation.”
It’s the second assault on RZD for the reason that begin of the warfare in Ukraine. Final February, the Russian railway’s web site and cell app had been additionally down as a result of intense distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults. Such assaults work by flooding a focused web site with junk visitors, making them unreachable.
On the time of the incident, the corporate elevated the variety of ticket places of work at railway stations so that each one passengers might purchase tickets.
Cyberattacks concentrating on railways can drastically disrupt a rustic’s logistics. Final yr, a cyberattack on the Belarusian state railway crippled its community, allegedly hindering the switch of Russian troops into Belarus for army workout routines.
The Belarusian hacktivist collective Cyber Partisans, which claimed duty for the assault, stated that some trains stopped operating after hackers compromised the railway system’s routing and switching gadgets and rendered them inoperable by encrypting information saved on them.
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Daryna Antoniuk
Daryna Antoniuk
is a contract reporter for Recorded Future Information primarily based in Ukraine. She writes about cybersecurity startups, cyberattacks in Jap Europe and the state of the cyberwar between Ukraine and Russia. She beforehand was a tech reporter for Forbes Ukraine. Her work has additionally been revealed at Sifted, The Kyiv Impartial and The Kyiv Publish.
